Over the past four years of being on Twitter, I’ve slowly turned on SMS notifications for people that I wanted to keep up-to-date on. This worked great when I had a few people that occasionally tweeted - I could see what they were up to in a passive manner and reply if I wanted to.

Unfortunately, as this list grew, so did the uselessness of text notifications on my phone. At one point in the past year, I turned off vibrate notifications for SMS messages Unfortunately, this meant that while my phone wasn’t vibrating every other minute from Twitter notifications, it also meant that my phone wasn’t vibrating when friends would try to reach me via SMS.

This left me missing messages all the time and I became frustrated with myself that I was difficult to reach. So today, I disabled notifications for all 96 people I had them turned on for and added those people to a (private) list. I’ll turn them on slowly one-by-one as I miss my friends, but now when somebody tries to get ahold of me, I won’t be as likely to miss it. And I can still keep up with those people using Twitter’s list functionality.

Below is the quick snippet of code I used (by way of Hayes Davis’ great Grackle Twitter library.